You may not know exactly where Somalia is. Or really much about its history. But this unique African country on the North Eastern tip of the African continent – which was both a former Italian and British colony – is going to be in the newspapers you read and on your social media timelines a lot in 2021 – if the petulant outgoing president Trump gets his way and pulls out 700 or so U.S. troops.

While it’s still unclear whether Trump will really go ahead with the total troop withdrawal of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, which will almost certainly lead to the Taliban gaining the upper hand during the so-called Doha peace talks, in Somalia it is almost certain he will go ahead with the ruse, because its impact – he probably believes – will be less and will draw less wrath from the press. Somalia is bite-sized, he will figure.

But he couldn’t be more wrong.

Somalia, a troubled country which fell into the abyss in 1991 and has been controlled by terrorist groups since, is more important than most western journalists realise. And although the small contingent of U.S. troops there is tiny, in terms of military capabilities, it is hugely symbolic in keeping the international community there and preventing the country slide into a civil war.

The worry from many Somali apparatchiks is that if the U.S. pulls out, then the rest of the international contingent – including the EU and several important European governments – will also do the same, leaving the country vulnerable to Al Shabab taking total control over a fragile patchwork of troubled federal states. Of course, there will be resistance to this from a great many clan leaders who will feel they have no choice now other than to remove the knife from the sheaf to defend their lands and their political enclaves.

Initially it was Bill Clinton, who, almost as soon as taking office in January 1993 was presented with the problem of armed clans taking all of the food aid arriving in the port of Mogadishu, causing a famine in the interior. The democrat president from Arkansas signed off for U.S. troops to go in, which led to the Black Hawk Down catastrophe, which Clinton never really recovered from on the international circuit, even contributing to the genocide in Rwanda, following the Tutsi coup which was also an ill-conceived CIA plan which blew up in everyone’s face.

Will Joe Biden and his new secretary of state Antony Blinken suffer a similar ill fate when they take office in January?

For years, Somalia has been on the brink of a brink of a total civil and military meltdown. The only stalwart measure of wisdom from the west, which has prevented total calamity leading to an inevitable civil war, was keeping U.S. troops there as a reminder that America has the ability to strike quickly if it needs to. To remove those soldiers, as Trump is likely to do, for most educated Somalis is for the country to take a suicide pill.

Al Shabab’s roots are in a Salafi extremist movement which was born from the post-Siad Barre period but later boosted both by foreign jihadists post 9/11 under the affiliation to Al Qaeda – and then an invasion by Ethiopia in 2006 which swelled its ranks even further. It had, at one point, taken control of the capital but was pushed back by a UN-backed African Union peace-keeping mission. The very real worry is that this mission AMISOM simply won’t be able to cope with anarchy on all sides as its resources are limited. It simply won’t be able to operate in a civil war situation even with the present numbers of U.S. troops and other contingents there. Certainly if U.S. troops pull out, this will be the hair trigger that starts a civil war on all fronts.

Yet unlike before, the situation is made even more complicated by Somalia’s relationships in recent years with regional powers who some might argue would thrive in the chaos of civil war and revel in the opportunity to pursue their agendas. Qatar has always had an opaque, if not two-faced relationship with the Somali government and is often accused of fuelling terrorism within Somalia, pitching one clan against another. It is also often accused outright of wrecking the relative peace that the country’s president Mohamed Abdullahi Farmaajo had built, when Doha raised the stakes in the so-called special relationship and installed their own TV propagandist from Al Jazeera into the position of security chief.

What happens to Faramaajo when the country slides into civil war? Does he become the puppet which Qatar props up, exactly in the same way the Saudis kept Yemen’s president in office, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi in exile? Will Somalia be the new Yemen war which Joe Biden will be a spectator of while the world’s media catches up onto the farce of Trump’s claims to be a peace broker? As DC based analysts scramble over the idea that it could have been Trump himself to have resolved the four-year dispute between Qatar and its GCC neighbours, the final nail in that particular coffin could be Somalia, given that the UAE is also an active player in this country and has its own ambitions of hegemony there. If Faramaajo is to become Qatar’s own Hadi, no doubt exiled to Doha, then does that make the internal battle between the UAE and Saudi Arabia in Yemen, replicated more or less in Somalia? Does the UAE find its own group of rebels – Al Shabab itself? – which it backs, so as to topple “Mr Cheese”? Will the war spill over into peaceful Somaliland, a breakaway state which has its own scores to settle in Somalia?

It’s a cruel irony though that the power vacuum that Obama himself created when he reduced America’s role in the entire region to ‘soft power’ opened up a chasm for Qatar, UAE and Turkey to fill in failed states like Somalia – and now one which is about to bite Joe Biden on the arse before he even enters the Oval Office. The democrats are cursed by Somalia, it seems, but just as Bill Clinton had to make his toughest foreign policy decision almost immediately entering the Oval Office, so too will Joe Biden.

There was a time, almost two decades ago, when America was not at war throughout the greater Middle East. Events in November 2020 boosted the hope that such a time might return sooner rather than later. That was when Trump installed a group of officials in the defense department who are apparently more responsive to his decision to wind down U.S. forever wars. He appointed Chris Miller as secretary of defense. He also named Col. Douglas Macgregor, Kash Patel and Ezra Cohen to high-level positions. Macgregor’s appointment stands out, because of his history of outspoken opposition to America’s military adventures in the Middle East and Southwest Asia. His antiwar views have not won him friends in the Pentagon. Meanwhile, he has alienated potential allies outside it with his intolerant views on immigrants. But those views are simply not relevant to his abilities regarding ending U.S. wars.

A November 2006, CounterPunch article by Macgregor was headlined, “There’s Only One Option Left: Leave.” He depicted the Bush regime’s Iraq war strategy as fundamentally flawed, noting that “occupying and governing it directly with thousands of conventional U.S. combat troops under generals whose only strategy was brute force was even more disastrous…disengaging from Iraq would seem imperative.” In the ensuing years, he wrote and published regularly against America’s wars in the Middle East, calling the U.S. military policy in that region the unmitigated calamity that it was.

The disaster continues. The antiwar vote may very well have put Trump over the top in 2016 – but then he waited, four long years, to reduce the number of U.S. soldiers in the Middle East. In fact, early in his tenure, he increased the number of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. And he has added soldiers in Iraq. He also dropped more bombs on the Middle East than Obama did, if such is imaginable. According to some calculations, Trump dropped a bomb every 12 minutes, surpassing Obama’s record of one every half hour. Trump did attempt to disengage from Syria, but managed to stab the Kurds in the back in the process, greenlighting ethnic cleansing by Turks and thus causing thousands of Kurdish deaths. Besides, regarding exiting Syria, his generals and the defense department weren’t having it. So the whole thing was bloodily, criminally botched from the start.

Now, having lost the 2020 election, lame-duck President Trump has “decapitated” defense department leadership – apparently, at last, to bring troops home. The initial reason for believing this was that he hired Macgregor, who advised Obama in a 2016 article “to tell the American people the truth: America’s military interventions in the Middle East and Southwest Asia are festering sores, bottomless pits for American blood and treasure…Americans in uniform cannot and will not ‘fix’ the Middle East.”

The Pentagon was scheduled to reduce U.S. troops in Afghanistan to 4500 in November. That’s troops – it doesn’t even touch contractors, and more American contractors have died in that country, 24,202 of them, than soldiers. According to National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien in an October announcement, U.S. troops in Afghanistan “will go down to 2500” by early 2021. Others in the Pentagon object, citing spiking violence in the country. But the argument can be made that there will always be spiking violence in Afghanistan, and if U.S. troops stay there until absolute peace breaks out, they will be there for generations. Indeed, some in the military have referred to the U.S. war in Afghanistan as generational. We’ve been there 20 years. That’s almost a generation. One generation is enough.

Meanwhile a new war looms like the grim reaper on the horizon, a war with Iran. Ping-ponging between theatrical roles as peacemaker one minute and warlord the next, Trump announces troop cuts in Afghanistan, only to follow this up with the lousy idea of dispatching Mike Pompeo to Saudi Arabia for secret consultations, presumably on assaulting Iran. Immediately afterward, there’s a provocation – the assassination of a nuclear physicist – and the chances of catastrophic regional war, which would also ensnare the U.S., skyrocket. Who knows? Iran’s formidable allies, Russia and China could even be dragged in. That’s unlikely, but not impossible. So what’s wrong with this picture – the war with Iran picture? Everything.

Trump’s Iran policy has been one blunder after another, starting with busting up the nuclear treaty, one of Obama’s few decent, intelligent accomplishments in the Middle East. If Trump thinks bequeathing the world a new war in that region means exiting with glory, he is mistaken. An attack on Iran would be a massive war crime – not exactly the way to burnish a presidential legacy. Not incidentally, everyone would take such a move as that of a deranged sore loser, fixated on exacting revenge on somebody, anybody for his electoral defeat. Trump would do well to stick with what brought him success with voters in 2016 – ending the forever wars, not starting them. For that he will have to cut U.S. troops in the Middle East as close to zero as possible. And this needs to happen fast.

Why? So it’s harder to reverse. Because unfortunately, one of President-elect Joe Biden’s most favored defense secretary candidates, Michele Flournoy, does not appear interested in a speedy troop drawdown. In fact, according to Progressive Realism, her cv includes support of Bush’s doctrine of preemptive war, authoring a report that urged sending weapons to Ukraine, advocating arming Al Qaeda-linked rebels in Syria to topple Assad and backing that move with airpower, and more military deterrence aimed at Iran. Progressive Realism adds that Flournoy wrote that the current Pentagon budget “may well be insufficient to deter or defeat Chinese aggression in the future.” This last opinion is colossally dangerous. The Pentagon budget is humongous, and war with China is an abysmal idea, one Trump put on the table and which civilian and military bigwigs, no matter how hostile to him, will fight like crazy to keep there.

Flournoy has decried a “precipitous” withdrawal from Afghanistan. This contrasts with current defense chief Chris Miller’s view, expressed on November 13 that “we are not in a state of perpetual war – it is the antithesis of everything for which we stand and for which our ancestors fought. All wars must end.” If Trump, Miller and Macgregor really want all troops out of Afghanistan, they better move swiftly. Again, the longer they wait, the tougher the job. If U.S. troops don’t exit till mid-January, a new secretary of defense could just turn around and send them back in. The longer we’re out, the more legitimate and irreversible the withdrawal.

But so far little has happened. No total departure from Afghanistan and Iraq. Leaving Syria is trickier, because it must be done, somehow, without further harming U.S. allies, the Kurds. CNN reported on November 16 that commanders had received a “warning order” to “drawdown the number of troops in Afghanistan to 2500 troops and 2500 in Iraq by January 15.” According to the New York Times, almost all U.S. troops would leave Somalia. As for Syria – no reductions for the several hundred U.S. soldiers stationed there. But enthusiastic war-mongers everywhere can rejoice: U.S. forces will remain in Kenya and Djibouti, where American drones that carry out airstrikes in Somalia are based, the Times reported.

Even this partial exit drew immediate fire from everybody – the media, congress, other government officials, assorted think tankers. No less a pooh-bah than Mitch “democracy’s grave-digger” McConnell weighed in, blasting any attempt finally to return U.S. soldiers home. The Hill quoted him as observing that a “premature exit…would be reminiscent of the humiliating American departure from Saigon in 1975.” Needless to say, overall, the entire defense department except for Trump’s new appointees regards leaving Afghanistan now, after 20 years, as “precipitous.”

When the U.S. military comes, it stays. Vietnam was the exception that proves the rule. Seventy-five years after World War II, the U.S. military is still in Germany and Japan. It’s still in Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan. The U.S. globe-spanning empire includes over 800 military bases in 70 countries. That’s called conquest. And when the U.S. military conquers territory, that’s it. It stays. But for those who oppose this global conquest, for foreigners alarmed for their countries’ sovereignty or for U.S. citizens opposed to war and convinced the empire is strangling what little remains of their democracy, there is an alternative worthy of support, namely, an orderly retreat from foreign adventures, followed by systematic closure of military bases in other people’s countries. Otherwise the capitalist empire will suffer the fate of all empires – dangerous, violent, torturously drawn-out and possibly fascist collapse. Wouldn’t a more modest, secure, sovereign republic, with a democracy and a mixed economy that benefits its citizens, be better?

counterpunch.org

At the end of ‘The Dystopic Great Reset and the Fight Back […]’ that it would be necessary to trace aspects of the history of the social contract in order to lay the foundation of understanding

In our previous essay ‘Capitalism After Corona Lockdown: Having the Power to Walk Away’, we also then posed the question of the social contract itself.

Because the vast majority of us today are born into civilization, we don’t always think about its origins in terms of the agency of individuals who joined or formed the first civilizations. We tend to be taught through our institutions that it was something in between voluntary and natural, and the great 19^th century nationalist romanticism promoted a view of self-determination of peoples, a view that would later be taken up by nationalist and leftist movements around the world in the 20^th century – later enshrined in the UN.

But much of the story of the first state-building civilizations, understanding that people are a resource when organized and put to work, is that some balance between slavery and half-freedom rests at its foundation.

The mass production of books and guns, which came about within the same historical period, entirely upended the old foundation of class society. The mass production of guns and books may have, at a certain point, been seen as powerful reinforcements for the status quo. Larger armies could be effectively armed at lower cost. The Ideological State Apparatus, as we can infer from Althusser, could be disseminated and internalized more effectively. But as with technology, came its dual-use features. The very technologies developed with an eye at perfecting the control mechanisms within the status quo of oligarchic orders, in keeping up with the technologies that other competing power networks (countries, kingdoms, nations, etc.), can be turned on its head if these technologies were democratized and fell into the hands of the broadest possible numbers of people. Such was the process both in the American Revolution, and also for instance in the Vietnamese resistance to Japanese, French, and American colonialism in the last century.

For the first time in many centuries, knowledge and brute force were no longer an insurmountable near-monopoly held by the state or those it could compromise. The gun – the great equalizer of men, and the book – the great liberator of minds.

Since that epoch of great emancipation and promise, technology has continued with this contradictory path of dual-use. However, the balance of power and the natures of technologies hitherto developed has shifted tremendously, favoring the status quo and disempowering the broad masses. This lamentable condition, however, is upended by the applied technologies which the real 4^th Industrial Revolution (not the World Economic Forum’s model) brings into being.

In the last epoch of the 20^th century, we had begun a dangerous trajectory to a blind-sighted overspecialization (compartmentalization/fachidiotizmus) which are the hallmarks of technocracy, and away from the liberatory epoch of centuries past which gave rise to constitutional republics.

In the past, before the old liberatory epoch, just as a military class was reliant on exclusive access to armaments, today is characterized by a combination of pharmaceutical and social programming through media which are powers out of the reach of the people. This rise and perfection of what Heidegger would define and what Marcuse would characterize as a permanently stable techno-industrial bureaucratic mode of society, characterizes today’s world of social-media influencing, anti-depressants, mass psychological operations such as virtual or holographic pandemics (HIV, Covid-19, etc.), and the surveillance state.

This part is most important in establishing that for the foreseeable future, escaping the 4^th Industrial Revolution is an impossibility. At the same time, the dual-use nature of the technologies still hold some liberatory potential, but the past methods of arriving at these has changed.

This means that the ideology of the ruling class is tremendously important. Unlike revolutionary republican and bolshevist conceptions of power and change which share an insurrectionist presumption premised in the liberatory age of guns and books (which made the ‘political soldier’ a possibility), we have increasingly entered a zenith point in social-control technologies wherein the likelihood of a controlled group winning a contest for power against the controlling group approaches zero, if we imagine this as a contest between armed groups wherein the military acts not in the interests of their extended families, but in the interests of those writing the checks.

Such limitations were already understood by those influenced by bolshevism, such as Antonio Gramsci in his discussion of hegemony in his Quaderni del Carcere. Cultural hegemony is a war of attrition over the entire ideological terrain, a component of what today we might call full-spectrum dominance. This parallels (and must have influenced) the later Althusserian conception of the Ideological State Apparatus (ISA).

The single-most revolutionary legal document to have arisen in the course of the last three-hundred years in the western tradition was the U.S. Constitution. At its foundation rests the assumption that man is born free, and enters into a social contract willingly, a view supported by a view of natural rights, natural law, and an equality of the soul endowed by the creator.

It is a social contract that man enters into every-day, and can exit any-day.

To understand the liberatory potential of a 4th Industrial Revolution is to understand the dual-use nature of technology in the history of liberatory epochs.

Before the rise of computers and robots performing much of the labor in society, societies grew in strength as they grew in people. With automation and roboticization, human beings become a surplus cost of no consequence to production provided that society itself is not anthropocentric.

The new normal being proposed, is one with no freedom of thought, let alone expression. It is one with social credit, tagging people as if they were animals on a wildlife reserve, and the total regimentation of every-day life. The contours of what techno-industrial civilization can lead to, of what scientific tyranny looks like, is not only visible to us now, but has been creeping into our lives for the past century.

The response to this in the U.S. has been an increasing support for Trump and the phenomenon that can really be described as ‘Trumpism’, which despite the media hologram of a Biden victory will most probably result in a second Trump administration. Trumpism has become synonymous with Constitutionalism, despite the revenge-fantasy language and tropes employed by a disconcerting segment of its base. In England, we have seen a parallel movement of the post-left, and a rise in ‘common law’ activism and an activist education campaign surrounding the meaning of the Magna Carta. For these parallel reasons, we had also previously characterized the Trump phenomenon as the child of a frustrated Occupy Wall Street movement after its affair with the Tea Party, but back in numbers and strength by a dispossessed working class long ago betrayed by organized labor, the DNC, and imbalanced trade deals with China.

But while these responses (with their defects and limitations) are a healthy sign, they do not yet have the depth to articulate a countering vision for society which also takes into account the state of technology as it exists today. That is why we have not seen a very thorough public discussion on the reality of technology, and the state of matters which are real and present.

Instead, we see from the conservative reaction to the 4IR – a reaction which raises all of the correct concerns and levies all of the correct criticisms against the banker’s version of it. This historically parallels the Luddites, who saw at the start of the 19^th century that mass industry was replacing the work of the skilled trades and craftsmen with machines.

Their solution, to destroy the machines, failed primarily because machines produce more in volume than men. Even if they had won the political battle, it would have only been a matter of time before a competing society fully utilizing industry would over-take theirs. And perhaps this here tells the entire story of the conquest over nomadic and agriculturalist societies at the hands of the state-building, techno-industrial societies even thousands of years ago.

And so we arrive at the stark truth – there is no running or hiding from the future.

It is the task of free citizens to take ahold of the emerging new technologies into their own hands, for their own purposes: to live in society that acts towards human freedom and dignity of the soul. A world where our small children can grow up in a world without unnecessary humility or fear. A world where there is promise and hope, a promise truly justified by a real-existing society around them based upon what is true, what is beautiful, and what is good.

The author can be found at FindMeFlores@gmail.com. Please consider supporting my work at SubscribeStar  

The so-called Age of Trump is also an age of instantly forgotten bestselling books, especially ones purporting to provide the inside scoop on what goes on within Donald Trump’s haphazard and continuously shifting orbit. With metronomic regularity, such gossipy volumes appear, make a splash, and almost as quickly vanish, leaving a mark no more lasting than a trout breaking the surface in a pond.

Remember when Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House was all the rage? It’s now available in hardcover for $0.99 from online used booksellers. James Comey’s Higher Loyalty also sells for a penny less than a buck.

An additional 46 cents will get you Omarosa Manigault Newman’s “insider’s account” of her short-lived tenure in that very White House. For the same price, you can acquire Sean Spicer’s memoir as Trump’s press secretary, Anthony Scaramucci’s rendering of his tumultuous 11-day stint as White House communications director and Corey Lewandowski’s “inside story” of the 2016 presidential campaign.

Bibliophiles intent on assembling a complete library of Trumpiana will not have long to wait before the tell-all accounts of John Bolton, Michael Cohen, Mary Trump, and that journalistic amaneusis Bob Woodward will surely be available at similar bargain-basement prices.

All that said, even in these dismal times genuinely important books do occasionally make their appearance. My friend and colleague Stephen Wertheim is about to publish one. It’s called Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy and if you’ll forgive me for being direct, you really ought to read it. Let me explain why.

The ‘Turn’

Wertheim and I are co-founders of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a small Washington, D.C.-based think tank. That Quincy refers to John Quincy Adams who, as secretary of state nearly two centuries ago, warned his fellow citizens against venturing abroad “in search of monsters to destroy.” Were the United States to do so, Adams predicted, its defining trait — its very essence — “would insensibly change from liberty to force.” By resorting to force, America “might become the dictatress of the world,” he wrote, but “she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.” While his gendered punchline might rankle contemporary sensibilities, it remains apt.

A privileged man of his times, Adams took it for granted that a WASP male elite was meant to run the country. Women were to occupy their own separate sphere. And while he would eventually become an ardent opponent of slavery, in 1821 race did not rank high on his agenda either. His immediate priority as secretary of state was to situate the young republic globally so that Americans might enjoy both safety and prosperity. That meant avoiding unnecessary trouble. We had already had our revolution. In his view, it wasn’t this country’s purpose to promote revolution elsewhere or to dictate history’s future course.

Adams was to secretaries of state what Tom Brady is to NFL quarterbacks: the Greatest Of All Time. As the consensus GOAT in the estimation of diplomatic historians, he brought to maturity a pragmatic tradition of statecraft originated by a prior generation of New Englanders and various slaveholding Virginians with names like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. That tradition emphasized opportunistically ruthless expansionism on this continent, avid commercial engagement, and the avoidance of great power rivalries abroad. Adhering to such a template, the United States had, by the beginning of the 20th century, become the wealthiest, most secure nation on the planet — at which point Europeans spoiled the party.

The disastrous consequences of one European world war fought between 1914 and 1918 and the onset of a second in 1939 rendered that pragmatic tradition untenable — so at least a subsequent generation of WASPs concluded. This is where Wertheim takes up the story. Prompted by the German army’s lightning victory in the battle of France in May and June 1940, members of that WASP elite set about creating — and promoting — an alternative policy paradigm, one he describes as pursuing “dominance in the name of internationalism,” with U.S. military supremacy deemed “the prerequisite of a decent world.”

The new elite that devised this paradigm did not consist of lawyers from Massachusetts or planters from Virginia. Its key members held tenured positions at Yale and Princeton, wrote columns for leading New York newspapers, staffed Henry Luce’s Time-Life press empire, and distributed philanthropic largesse to fund worthy causes (grasping the baton of global primacy being anything but least among them). Most importantly, just about every member of this Eastern establishment cadre was also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). As such, they had a direct line to the State Department, which in those days actually played a large role in formulating basic foreign policy.

While Tomorrow, The World is not a long book — fewer than 200 pages of text — it is a tour de force. In it, Wertheim describes the new narrative framework that the foreign-policy elite formulated in the months following the fall of France. He shows how Americans with an antipathy for war now found themselves castigated as “isolationists,” a derogatory term created to suggest provincialism or selfishness. Those favoring armed intervention, meanwhile, became “internationalists,” a term connoting enlightenment and generosity. Even today, members of the foreign-policy establishment pledge undying fealty to the same narrative framework, which still warns against the bugaboo of “isolationism” that threatens to prevent high-minded policymakers from exercising “global leadership.”

Wertheim persuasively describes the “turn” toward militarized globalism engineered from above by that self-selected, unelected crew. Crucially, their efforts achieved success prior to Pearl Harbor. The Japanese attack of Dec. 7, 1941, may have thrust the United States into the ongoing world war, but the essential transformation of policy had already occurred, even if ordinary Americans had yet to be notified as to what it meant. Its future implications — permanently high levels of military spending, a vast network of foreign bases stretching across the globe, a penchant for armed intervention abroad, a sprawling “national security” apparatus, and a politically subversive arms industry — would only become apparent in the years ahead.

While Wertheim is not the first to expose isolationism as a carefully constructed myth, he does so with devastating effect. Most of all, he helps his readers understand that “so long as the phantom of isolationism is held to be the most grievous sin, all is permitted.”

Contained within that all is a cavalcade of forceful actions and grotesque miscalculations, successes and failures, notable achievements and immense tragedies both during World War II and in the decades that followed. While beyond the scope of Wertheim’s book, casting the Cold War as a de facto extension of the war against Nazi Germany, with Soviet dictator Josef Stalin as a stand-in for Adolf Hitler, represented an equally significant triumph for the foreign policy establishment.

At the outset of World War II, ominous changes in the global distribution of power prompted a basic reorientation of U.S. policy. Today, fundamental alterations in the global distribution of power — did someone say “the rise of China”? — are once again occurring right before our eyes. Yet the foreign-policy establishment’s response is simply to double down.

So, even now, staggering levels of military spending, a vast network of foreign bases, a penchant for armed intervention abroad, a sprawling “national security” apparatus, and a politically subversive arms industry remain the taken-for-granted signatures of U.S. policy. And even now, the Establishment employs the specter of isolationism as a convenient mechanism for self-forgiveness and expedient amnesia, as well as a means to enforce discipline.

Frozen Compass

The fall of France was indeed an epic disaster. Yet implicit in Tomorrow, The World is this question: If the disaster that befell Europe in 1940 could prompt the United States to abandon a hitherto successful policy paradigm, then why have the serial disasters befalling the nation in the present century not produced a comparable willingness to reexamine an approach to policy that is obviously failing today?

To pose that question is to posit an equivalence between the French army’s sudden collapse in the face of the Wehrmacht’s assault and the accumulation of U.S. military disappointments dating from 9/11. From a tactical or operational perspective, many will find such a comparison unpersuasive. After all, the present-day armed forces of the United States have not succumbed to outright defeat, nor is the government of the United States petitioning for a cessation of hostilities as the French authorities did in 1940.

Yet what matters in war are political outcomes. Time and again since 9/11, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, or lesser theaters of conflict, the United States has failed to achieve the political purposes for which it went to war. From a strategic and political perspective, therefore, the comparison with France is instructive, even if failure need not entail abject surrender.

The French people and other supporters of the 1930s European status quo (including Americans who bothered to pay attention) were counting on that country’s soldiers to thwart further Nazi aggression once and for all. Defeat came as a profound shock. Similarly, after the Cold War, most Americans (and various beneficiaries of a supposed Pax Americana) counted on U.S. troops to maintain an agreeable and orderly global status quo. Instead, the profound shock of 9/11 induced Washington to embark upon what became a series of “endless wars” that U.S. forces proved incapable of bringing to a successful conclusion.

Crucially, however, no reevaluation of U.S. policy comparable to the “turn” that Wertheim describes has occurred. An exceedingly generous reading of Trump’s promise to put “America First” might credit him with attempting such a turn. In practice, however, his incompetence and inconsistency, not to mention his naked dishonesty, produced a series of bizarre and random zigzags. Threats of “fire and fury” alternated with expressions of high regard for dictators (“we fell in love”). Troop withdrawals were announced and then modified or forgotten. Trump abandoned a global environmental agreement, massively rolled back environmental regulations domestically, and then took credit for providing Americans with “the very cleanest air and cleanest water on the planet.” Little of this was to be taken seriously.

Trump’s legacy as a statesman will undoubtedly amount to the diplomatic equivalent of Mulligan stew. Examine the contents closely enough and you’ll be able to find just about anything. Yet taken as a whole, the concoction falls well short of being nutritious, much less appetizing.

On the eve of the upcoming presidential election, the entire national security apparatus and its supporters assume that Trump’s departure from office will restore some version of normalcy. Every component of that apparatus from the Pentagon and the State Department to the CIA and the Council on Foreign Relations to the editorial boards of The New York Times and The Washington Post yearns for that moment.

To a very considerable degree, a Biden presidency will satisfy that yearning. Nothing if not a creature of the Establishment, Biden himself will conform to its requirements. For proof, look no further than his vote in favor of invading Iraq in 2003. (No isolationist he.) Count on a Biden administration, therefore, to perpetuate the entire obsolete retinue of standard practices.

As Peter Beinart puts it, “When it comes to defense, a Biden presidency is likely to look very much like an Obama presidency, and that’s going to look not so different from a Trump presidency when you really look at the numbers.” Biden will increase the Pentagon budget, keep U.S. troops in the Middle East and get tough with China. The United States will remain the world’s No. 1  arms merchant, accelerate efforts to militarize outer space, and continue the ongoing modernization of the entire U.S. nuclear strike force. Biden will stack his team with CFR notables looking for jobs on the “inside.”

Above all, Biden will recite with practiced sincerity the mantras of American exceptionalism as a summons to exercise global leadership. “The triumph of democracy and liberalism over fascism and autocracy created the free world. But this contest does not just define our past. It will define our future, as well.” Those uplifting sentiments are, of course, his from a recent Foreign Affairs essay.

So, if you liked U.S. national security policy before Trump mucked things up, then Biden is probably your kind of guy. Install him in the Oval Office and the mindless pursuit of “dominance in the name of internationalism” will resume. And the United States will revert to the policies that prevailed during the presidencies of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama — policies, we should note, that paved the way for Donald Trump to win the White House.

The Voices That Count

What explains the persistence of this pattern despite an abundance of evidence showing that it’s not working to the benefit of the American people? Why is it so difficult to shed a policy paradigm that dates from Hitler’s assault on France, now a full 80 years in the past?

I hope that in a subsequent book Stephen Wertheim will address that essential question. In the meantime, however, allow me to make a stab at offering the most preliminary of answers.

Setting aside factors like bureaucratic inertia and the machinations of the military-industrial complex — the Pentagon, arms manufacturers, and their advocates in Congress share an obvious interest in discovering new “threats” — one likely explanation relates to a policy elite increasingly unable to distinguish between self-interest and the national interest. As secretary of state, John Quincy Adams never confused the two. His latter-day successors have done far less well.

As an actual basis for policy, the turn that Stephen Wertheim describes in Tomorrow, The World has proven to be nowhere near as enlightened or farseeing as its architects imagined or its latter-day proponents still purport to believe it to be. The paradigm produced in 1940-1941 was, at best, merely serviceable. It responded to the nightmarish needs of that moment. It justified U.S. participation in efforts to defeat Nazi Germany, a necessary undertaking.

After 1945, except as a device for affirming the authority of foreign-policy elites, the pursuit of “dominance in the name of internationalism” proved to be problematic. Yet even as conditions changed, basic U.S. policy stayed the same: high levels of military spending, a network of foreign bases, a penchant for armed intervention abroad, a sprawling “national security” apparatus, and a politically subversive arms industry. Even after the Cold War and 9/11, these remain remarkably sacrosanct.

My own retrospective judgment of the Cold War tends toward an attitude of: well, I guess it could have been worse. When it comes to the U.S. response to 9/11, however, it’s difficult to imagine what worse could have been.

Within the present-day foreign-policy establishment, however, a different interpretation prevails: the long, twilight struggle of the Cold War ended in a world historic victory, unsullied by any unfortunate post-9/11 missteps. The effect of this perspective is to affirm the wisdom of American statecraft now eight decades old and therefore justify its perpetuation long after both Hitler and Stalin, not to mention Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, are dead and gone.

This paradigm persists for one reason only: it ensures that statecraft will remain a realm that resolutely excludes the popular will. Elites decide, while the job of ordinary Americans is to foot the bill. In that regard, the allocation of privileges and obligations now 80 years old still prevails today.

Only by genuinely democratizing the formulation of foreign policy will real change become possible. The turn in U.S. policy described in Tomorrow, The World came from the top. The turn needed today will have to come from below and will require Americans to rid themselves of their habit of deference when it comes to determining what this nation’s role in the world will be. Those on top will do all in their power to avert any such loss of status.

The United States today suffers from illnesses both literal and metaphorical. Restoring the nation to good health and repairing our democracy must necessarily rate as paramount concerns. While Americans cannot ignore the world beyond their borders, the last thing they need is to embark upon a fresh round of searching for distant monsters to destroy. Heeding the counsel of John Quincy Adams might just offer an essential first step toward recovery.

TomDispatch via consortiumnews.com

Trump has been both an ultra-conservative and nationalist president and an activist one: Until the COVID-19 virus hit, he was actually doing far better than his supercilious elitist critics on both Right and Left ever gave him credit for. But the onslaught of the pandemic has upended all his previous calculations.

What Trump needs to do to get reelected is follow the always overlooked but brilliantly successful example of America’s most underestimated president of the past century, Warren Gamaliel Harding.

The conditions under which Harding was elected a century ago are eerily familiar. The most deadly disease pandemic in U.S. history, the killer influenza, was still raging and ultimately took 600,000 lives – a comparable death toll to the U.S. Civil War and almost six times the death toll of World War I. Race riots were raging across America’s cities. Faith and trust in the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law had broken down. Scores of millions of people were out of work in the worst economic recession ever recorded to that point. It exploded in 1920 with terrifying rapidity. U.S. troops were also scattered all across the world on President Woodrow Wilson’s crazed efforts to police the entire world. They were even strung across vast regions of Siberia.

The Democrats promised a new golden age of international peace and understanding. They even had Franklin Roosevelt on their ticket as an exceptionally hard-working, charming and dynamic vice presidential candidate.

Against this supposedly formidable threat, Harding did – Nothing.

He stayed at home and ran a “front porch campaign” modeled on the last non-activist president William McKinley a quarter century before. He coined a new term “Normalcy” that the intellectuals from coast to coast sneered at. And he won, Harding’s margin of victory in 1920 was the greatest in modern American history to that point, He won a far greater mandate than any ever awarded to Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt or Wilson.

Far from being a lazy, ignorant mindless rubber stamp buffoon of a president, as 100 years of lying liberal U.S. Mainstream Media propaganda has claimed since, Harding was an exceptionally hardworking and effective Chief Executive. He brought in the nation’s foremost financier Andrew Mellon as Secretary of the Treasury and Mellon proved a stand out success in the post. Business confidence was restored in record time and the economy boomed. He quickly brought government spending under control. His secretary of state Charles Evans Hughes negotiated the most successful and biggest arms control agreement in history to that time, negotiating the Washington Navy Treaty. It was a vastly superior economic and foreign policy performance than Franklin Roosevelt ever managed until World War II bailed him out.

Harding restored law and order, He restored due process to the Department of Justice and ended Wilson’s Red Terror. He freed America’s leading Socialist, the beloved Eugene Debs, from harsh incarceration in Leavenworth federal penitentiary where Wilson had consigned him. Harding instead invited him to the White House for Christmas.

Wilson’s shameful racist imposition of anti-black segregation on the federal government and he also ended the non-constitutional Red Terror which destroyed far more lives than Senator Joe McCarthy ever dreamed of after World War II.

Harding also was the most outspoken opponent of segregation and lynching to occupy the presidency in the 76 years between Ulysses S Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower. So outspoken was he on behalf of basic civil rights for African Americans that racist Southerners claimed (falsely) that he must have back grandparents or other antecedents himself, since why else, they argued could he bother caring for black people at all?

Harding died of overwork in 1923, and over worry and shame over the Teapot Dome oil scandal. Like another great and shamefully underestimated Chief Executive, Grant after the Civil War, his one mortal weakness was that he was a good and honest man. who took people at their word and actually believed they would always tell him the truth. But he laid the foundation for a decade of the greatest economic boom in the history of the world bringing more prosperity to more ordinary human beings than had ever been thought possible before.

So great was Harding’s achievement that two more vastly inferior presidents – the ultra-passive Calvin Coolidge, who suffered debilitating depression throughout his presidency over the death of his son, and the humorless, catastrophically rigid Herbert Hoover were both elected on his legacy.

Today, Trump should embrace Harding as his last best hope. After all, Harding, like Trump maintained high tariff barriers to protect U.S. industry and agriculture. Like Trump, he stood for upholding law and order and fair play for African-Americans. And like Trump, he could boast of an outstanding business and finance record in office.

Also like Trump, Harding was wary of getting involved in any more endless overseas wars. He sought to bring home the U.S. armies from around the globe that his predecessor had manically scattered them. Just as Trump despises and distrusts the United Nations, Harding felt the same way towards its predecessor, the League of Nations.

However, Trump is likely still to lose in November because he is clearly incapable of learning wise, canny old Warren Harding’s most fundamental lesson: He does not know how to shut up.

To an America devastated by the great flu pandemic, disgusted by the horrors of World War I and sick and tired of Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and their endless speechifying, Harding came across as the embodiment of decency, restraint, kindness and good sense. When he died in 1923, the mourning for him was the greatest outpouring of grief for any sitting president since the death of Lincoln. It was vastly greater than for the passing of either Theodore Roosevelt in 1920 or Woodrow Wilson a few months later in 1924.

If former vice president Joe Biden wins in November, he is likely to prove a brief serving and catastrophic president – too old , too infirm and too wedded to reviving the catastrophic – and anti-Russian – policies of his old boss and friend Barack Obama.

But Biden, of all people, has learned the political, campaigning lessons of Warren Harding well. It is he, not Trump, who is staying at home as the COVID-19 pandemic still rages. It is he who is quietly building a solid, and probably eventually commanding lead in the polls. It is he who is projecting the image of decency, caring and fatherly reassurance. And it is he who offers the mirage of “normalcy” a return to (supposedly) better and more reassuring times.

If Trump can grab those brand recognition motifs from Biden he can still win, and even win big. But if he did that, he would have to abandon the lifelong persona of “Trump” that has served him so well for so long. And that he cannot do.

So, it will be Biden who wears the false sheepskin of reassuring wise and successful old Warren Harding. But his appalling policies will still be those of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, to his own country and entire world’s eternal ruin.

In a somewhat related development, the Iraqi parliament has called for the removal of U.S. troops from the country, a demand that has been rejected by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. Put it all together and it suggests that any announcement coming from the White House on ending America’s useless wars should be regarded with some skepticism.

The United States has its nearly 35,000 military personnel remaining in Germany as its contribution to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), founded in 1949 to counter Soviet forces in Eastern Europe in what was to become the Warsaw Pact. Both the Organization and Pact were ostensibly defensive alliances and the U.S. active participation was intended to demonstrate American resolve to come to the aid of Western Europe. Currently, 75 years after the end of World War II and thirty years after the fall of communist governments in Eastern Europe, NATO is an anachronism, kept going by the many statesmen and military establishments of the various countries that have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Since the demise of the European communist regimes, NATO has found work in bombing Serbia, destroying Libya and in helping in the unending task to train an Afghan army.

In spite of the clearly diminished threat in Europe, NATO has expanded to 30 members, including most of the former communist states that made up the Warsaw Pact. The most recent acquisition was Montenegro in 2016, which contributed 2,400 soldiers to the NATO force. That expansion was carried out in spite of assurances given to the post-Soviet Russian government that military encroachment would not take place. Currently, NATO continues to focus on the threat from Moscow as its own viable raison d’être, with its deployments and training exercises often taking place right up against Russia’s borders.

Few really believe that the Russia, which has a GDP only the size of Italy’s, intends or is even capable of reestablishing anything like the old Soviet Union. But a vulnerable Russia is nevertheless interested in maintaining an old-fashioned sphere of influence around its borders, which explains the concern over developments in Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic States.

Given the diminished threat level in Europe, the withdrawal of 9,500 soldiers should be welcomed by all parties. Trump has been sending the not unreasonable message that if the Europeans want more defense, they should pay for it themselves, though he has wrapped his proposal in his usual insulting and derogatory language. A wealthy Germany currently spends 1.1% of GDP on its military, far less than the 2% that NATO has declared to be a target to meet alliance commitments. That compares with the nearly 5% that the U.S. has been spending globally, inclusive of intelligence and national security costs.

Fair enough for burden sharing, but the European concern is more focused on how Trump does what he does. For example, he announced the downsizing without informing America’s NATO partners. The Germans were surprised and pushed back immediately. Conservative politician Peter Beyer said “This is completely unacceptable, especially since nobody in Washington thought about informing its NATO ally Germany in advance,” and German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas regretted the planned withdrawal, describing Berlin’s relationship with the Washington as “complicated.” Chancellor Angela Merkel was reportedly shocked.

The timing of the decision has also been questioned, with many observers believing that Trump deliberately staged the announcement to punish Merkel for refusing to attend a planned G-7 Summit in the U.S. that the president had been trying to arrange. Merkel argued that dealing with the consequences of the coronavirus made it difficult for her to leave home at the present time and the G-7 planning never got off the ground, which angered Trump, who wanted to demonstrate his global leadership in an election year.

Trump’s behavior has real world consequences. The Canadians and Europeans regard him as a joke, but a dangerous joke due to his impulsive decision making. He cannot be trusted and when he says something he often contradicts himself on the next day. Arguably Donald Trump was elected president on the margin of difference provided by an anti-war vote after many Americans took seriously his pledge to end the burgeoning overseas wars and bring the soldiers home. It all may have been a lie even as he was saying it, but it was convincing at the time and a welcome antidote to Hillary the Hawk.

There will be costs associated with removing or relocating the troops in Germany, to include constructing new bases somewhere else, hopefully in the United States, but the realization that the soldiers are not really needed could lead to the downsizing of the U.S. military across the board. That would be strongly resisted by the Pentagon, the defense industries and Congress.

If Trump is serious about downsizing America’s overseas commitments, the reduction in the German force is a good first step, even if it was done for the wrong reasons. It would be even better if he would force NATO into discussions about ending the alliance now that it is no longer needed, which would mean that the remaining American soldiers in Europe could come home.

The U.S. mission of global dominance has meant huge budget deficits and a national debt of $26 trillion, which is likely unsustainable. Germany and other European nations, by way of contrast, balance their government budgets every year. South Korea, which hosts 30,000 American soldiers, is wealthy and far more powerful than its northern neighbor. The continued occupation of Japan with 50,000 troops makes no sense even considering an increase in China’s regional power. Overall, the United States continues to have 170,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines based overseas in 150 countries and its military budget exceeds one trillion dollars when everything is considered. The Iraq and Afghanistan Wars may have cost as much as seven trillion dollars given the fact that much of the money was borrowed and will have to be repaid with interest.

It is past time for Donald Trump to make a bold move because the Democrats won’t have the backbone to rattle the status quo. End the foreign wars, shut down the overseas bases and bring the soldiers home. Spend tax dollars to improve the lives of Americans, not to fight wars for Saudis and Israelis. A simple formula for change, but sometimes simple is best.

Birch was a World War II-era fundamentalist Baptist missionary in China who volunteered to become an anti-Communist spy for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency, to jointly cooperate with Chinese Nationalist and Japanese occupation troops to battle against the Communist forces of Mao Zedong. Prior to his time with the OSS, Birch served as an intelligence officer for General Claire Chennault’s pro-Nationalist mercenaries, the Fourteenth Air Force, which had previously been called the Flying Tigers.

On August 25, 1945, while in the company of American, Nationalist Chinese, and Korean troops, Birch was stopped by a People’s Liberation Army patrol. Birch refused to surrender his weapon to the Communist military unit and after he began insulting the Communist rebels, a skirmish resulted, one in which Birch was shot and killed. One witness said that Birch told the young Communist peasants that if they killed him, the United States would “use the atomic bomb to stop their banditry.” The Chinese Communist guerrillas were not impressed with Birch’s “cowboy” bravado.

Birch, his brand of anti-Communism, and rejection of the U.S. wartime alliance with the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communists immediately became a cause célèbre for the American far-right. The John Birch Society, founded in 1958 in Indianapolis, Indiana by candy company magnate Robert Welch, Jr., believed that John Birch was the first casualty of World War III. Welch believed that the “Communist menace” was a sub-level international conspiracy that was ultimately led by the “Illuminati.” Welch’s conspiratorial delusions continue to find currency with Trump, his family members, and political supporters.

The Birch Society saw “Communists” hiding behind every tree and its rhetoric served as a valued life line to the “anti-Red” movement in the United States, particularly after the disgrace brought to it by Senator Joseph McCarthy and his “witch hunts” against alleged Communist in the federal government, military, and Hollywood. One of the society’s first members was Fred C. Koch, the father of Charles and the late David Koch – the infamous “Koch brothers” – who have funded various right-wing causes in the United States, including the presidential campaigns of Donald Trump. In keeping with their far-right upbringing, the Koch brothers helped fund the “Tea Party” movement, a grassroots effort that helped to lay the underpinnings of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign.

Among the longtime targets of the John Birchers and the Kochs have been the United Nations and its specialized agencies, including the WHO, the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the International Labor Organization (ILO), and others. In 1975, John Birch-oriented Republicans serving in the Gerald Ford administration – particularly White House chief of staff Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld – took advantage of the situation to advocate for U.S. disengagement from certain UN specialized agencies. In 1974, one of the first actions of the Ford administration was to serve notice to UNESCO that it would suspend dues payments unless certain anti-Israel resolutions were rescinded. The U.S. ambassador to the UN railed against the WHO for being concerned about public health issues in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. In 1975, informed the ILO that it would formally withdraw from the organization in 1977.

The Jimmy Carter administration reversed the Bircher-influenced decisions on UNESCO and the ILO. The anti-UN fervor by the United States would return with a vengeance in the Ronald Reagan administration. It considered the most anti-U.S., anti-Israeli, and anti-South African apartheid specialized agencies to be – from most politicized to least – UNESCO, the ILO, the WHO, and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). To the Reaganites, whose ranks included a number of John Birch sympathizers, the least politicized agencies were those over which the U.S. had a large say in management and direction, namely, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF).

John Birchers are consistent about one thing and that is their abject racism. Just as they condemned UNESCO and the FAO in the 1970s because they had African and Arab directors-general – Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow of Senegal and Edouard Saouma of Lebanon, respectively – they are now condemning the WHO because it has an Ethiopian director-general, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, a famed microbiologist from Ethiopia. Trump and his rabid far-right supporters have accused Dr. Tedros of being an agent=of-influence for China as part of the neo-John Birchers overall campaign to assign the cause of the coronavirus pandemic to China. The parents and grandparents of these John Birchers once blamed the “Communists” and the “Soviet Union” for being behind the fluoridation of America’s public water supply.

The Birchers even had a degree of success with the Bill Clinton administration, which withdrew the U.S. from the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the U.N. World Tourism Organization (UNWTO). Clinton’s reason for withdrawal was pure Bircher logic: they “lacked purpose” for the United States.

Today, acting under the auspices of front organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the Federalist Society – both bankrolled by the Charles Koch Foundation and the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation – the neo-John Birchers accuse China of being behind the coronavirus pandemic by intentionally or accidentally releasing the virus as a biological weapon. In lashing out at China, the far-right, including senior members of the Trump administration and Republican senators like Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have also placed Tedros and the “China-influenced” WHO in their gunsights.

The WHO is not the first UN agency to be singled out by the far-right as an instrument of China. The Heritage Foundation, whose white papers are often transformed into Trump administration policy, criticized the election of Qu Dongyu as director-general of FAO in 2019. Heritage blasted the UN for electing Qu as the fourth Chinese national to head a UN specialized agency. Chinese directors-general also lead the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), UNIDO, and the International  Telecommunication Union (ITU).

Four months before the first coronavirus case was reported in Wuhan, China, Heritage and its neo-John Bircher allies had convinced Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a Tea Party founder, to question Chinese influence at the UN. Heritage made several demands to its fellow-travelers in the Trump administration. They included: 1) tasking the U.S. intelligence community to report on Chinese objectives, tactics, and influence in international organizations; 2) Conduct an objective cost-benefit analysis of U.S. participation in each international organization;  3) the U.S. should focus its effort and resources on countering Chinese influence, advancing U.S. policy preferences, and increasing employment of U.S. nationals, particularly in senior positions, in those organizations whose remit affects key U.S. interests; 4) identify and carefully vet highly qualified candidates for leadership positions in international organizations well in advance of elections; 5) Counter Chinese financial and political pressure on foreign governments; 6) Press the UN, the specialized agencies, and UN funds and programs to increase employment of U.S. nationals; and 7) Elevate multilateral affairs and international organizations within the State Department by establishing an Under Secretary for Multilateral Affairs. 8) the U.S. should take all reasonable steps to ensure that an American or national of a like-minded country becomes the next International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) director-general.

As can be seen with Heritage’s bulletized attack on the UN, the current Trump administration attack on UN agency directors like Dr. Tedros was already in the planning stages and was part of the old John Birch playbook of either bending the UN and its specialized agencies to U.S. will or withdraw from them or cut off dues payments. Trump carried out his John Bircher-initiated orders by threatening to put a hold on U.S. payments to the WHO, even as the organization has become cash-strapped over its campaign to curb the coronavirus around the world.

On December 31, 2018, Trump pulled the U.S. out of UNESCO. It was the second U.S. withdrawal from UNESCO, Reagan having done so in 1984 after pressure was exerted on him by his own neo-John Birchers, many of them former Democrats who had been loyal to Democratic anti-Soviet war hawk Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson of Washington. In Trump’s case, it was UNESCO’s granting of full membership to Palestine in 2011 that incurred the wrath of Trump and his administration’s court Zionists, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner. In 2018, Trump threatened to withdraw the U.S. from one of the oldest international organizations, the Universal Postal Union (UPU), which even predated the League of Nations. Trump’s anger against the UPU was part of his overall aversion to government-run postal systems.

Trump has called the WHO “China-centric” merely because its last director-general, Dr. Margaret Chan, served as health director for the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong. She left as the WHO director-general in 2017. It matters not to the dullards in the Trump administration and his support team that Dr. Chan is a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health Medicine of the Royal College of Physicians of the United Kingdom and was also appointed as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II, far from being a “Chinese Communist” agent.

The neo-John Birchers in the Trump administration have made common cause with anti-Beijing pressure groups in Washington, including the CIA-linked Falun Gong and its propaganda outlet, the “Epoch Times” newspaper, which enjoys White House press credentials. Taiwan also maintains a formidable lobbying presence in Washington, a legacy of the old “Formosa Lobby” led by Soong Mei-ling, the wife of Nationalist Chinese General Chiang Kai-shek, who maintained the “Republic of China” on Taiwan following the rout of Nationalist forces by Mao Zedong’s Communist forces in 1949. The Taiwan Lobby has been successful in having the Trump administration intercede on its behalf after China objected to Taiwan’s participation in the WHO, ICAO, and other specialized agencies.

Trump has conveniently used the coronavirus as a reason to push his and the Birchers’ far-right agenda with regard to China’s increasing international profile and clout. China will remain a force to be reckoned with on the world stage long after the names Trump, Falun Gong, Formosa Lobby, and the John Birch Society are consigned to the trash heap of history.

By the time Donald Trump was condemning environmentalists as the “perennial prophets of doom” in Davos, his impeachment trial was opening in Washington. But quite by chance, at that very moment, I was reading a new edition of a book by a child survivor of the 1915 Armenian Holocaust which, hauntingly and poetically, said more about America than anything Trump – or Congress – could ever utter.

Leon Surmelian lost both his parents in 1915 and, just after the Second World War, he published I Ask You, Ladies and Gentlemen with the kind of horrific detail that only accounts of the Jewish Holocaust, a quarter of a century later, normally include. He remembered the naked and mutilated body of a young woman in a Turkish river – “her long hair floated down the current” – and “a human arm caught in the roots of a tree” and “a long, long band of frothy blood clinging to [the river] banks”. No wonder Israeli Jews speak today of the Armenian “Shoah” – the Holocaust, in Hebrew – which first struck the Christians of Ottoman Turkey.

But it was Surmelian’s salvation when he travelled later to Constantinople and visited the US-run Robert College, on a hill near Istanbul’s Castle of Rome, that caught my attention in his book. The college, now 154 years old and still perched between the two Bosporus bridges, coeducational and independent, deeply impressed the young Armenian whose dream was to go to America.

Here is what he wrote:

“The campus of Robert College … with its modern buildings, laboratories, gymnasium, tennis courts, track field, was an impressive example of American education. Nowhere in the city were there such fine school buildings, such an exhibit of wealth and education for the training of youth. But to me the most remarkable thing about it was this: here Armenian and Greek boys sat in the same classroom with Turkish boys, were … in daily contact as members of one civilised society, with no fights, no racial catcalls between them. There were also Bulgarian, Russian, Jewish, English, Persian students, all living in harmony. As America had no territorial ambitions in our part of the world, she enjoyed a unique moral authority. And more than the mechanical wonders, the industrial progress and power of America was this moral authority, possessed by no other nation on earth. In my own mind, the concept of America was based on that…”

And there you have it. Everything America was, Trump is not. And everything America is now did not exist in the Middle East at the end of the First World War.

Like the American University of Beirut, the New World was a beacon of US education and enlightenment. Just think of Trump, and then reflect on the ethnically mixed, diverse students — many of their parents enemies only a few months before – sitting together as members of the “civilised society” which Surmelian swiftly identified as American. The prohibition of Muslim immigrants and Mexican border walls would have been unthinkable at Robert College.

And what of America’s “unique moral authority” when its current president tears up nuclear treaties with Iran, climate change agreements and military alliances, betrays the Kurds, destroys Palestinian hopes of a state and demands cash for everything his soldiers do in the Middle East – cash to be paid for their presence and cash to be paid if the Arabs want them to leave?

Surmelian would have understood Trump’s obsession with “mechanical wonders” and “industrial progress” and power. The young Armenian was himself fascinated by these aspects of America. But, then still largely uneducated, he understood what morals – and “moral authority” — meant: the existence of a powerful nation which wanted to lead the world by moral example rather than raw power, which preferred to offer its education to the poor rather than its trillions of dollars worth of weapons to those who would oppress them, which wanted to lead by example rather than by bullying. Trump intends to “boldly seize the day”. The old America wanted to bring daylight to others.

Or did it? For behind every inspirational myth in the Middle East usually lies a dark future. The same America which Surmelian so admired after the First World War would be offered in 1919 the League of Nations mandate for broken Armenia and the stateless Kurds; a mandate similar to the poisoned chalice given the British in Palestine and Iraq and the French in Syria. This was all part of the Woodrow Wilson principle of “the right of self-determination of peoples”. A US military mission, led by First World War General James Harbord, was even sent to the wreckage of Armenia. One of its findings concluded that in many areas of what had been western Armenia, the Turks now outnumbered the Armenians — which was not surprising after the Turks had slaughtered a million and a half Armenians, including Surmelian’s parents, in 1915.

There was too much hatred around, Harbord thought, for the US to take on the Armenia mandate – which would have given to the present-day rump Armenian state some of its historic Turkish-Ottoman hinterland around Van and Trabzon, including access to the Black Sea. The Americans also decided they didn’t want to manage Kurdistan. So the Armenians – and the Kurds – got well and truly betrayed by the US. And this, remember, was a hundred years before Turkey frightened the American presidency (including Carter, Clinton, the Bushes, Obama and Trump) so much that the US would never formally acknowledge that the 1915 slaughter of the Armenians was a genocide. And a hundred years before Trump handed over the Syrian Kurds to Turkish occupation.

Perhaps isolationism reaches its final chapter in the narcissism, greed, dishonesty and insanity of Trumpism. He may now pose as Israel’s greatest friend and move the US embassy to Jerusalem, but his predecessors turned away European Jewish refugees from the Nazis. Or perhaps the enthusiasm of a younger America – leavened with Christian missionary zeal – was never going to produce the “moral authority” which Surmelian saw in the US. We should remember that America did enter the Second World War to fight the Nazis and the Japanese – but they did not do so until the Japanese attacked them at Pearl Harbour in 1941 and until Hitler declared war on America (rather than the other way round).

There are many brave souls in the Middle East who still believe that universal education, the substance and quality and essence of which Surmelian recognised in Constantinople, remains the only viable future for the region – and for us in our ignorance of its people. But this is water in the desert if we continue to betray the Palestinians, the Kurds and the millions of people who suffer under our well-armed local dictators, whether they be Trump’s “favourite dictator”, president el-Sisi of Egypt – whom I noticed at Davos, did I not? – or the ever more sinister Mohammed bin Salman, or Assad (armed by the Russians, of course) or the militias of Libya, Yemen or Iraq. If Trump can mix up al-Qaeda with the Kurds – as he once did – and point out that the Kurds (for some strange reason) did not participate in D-Day, then demand that the Palestinians accept cash in return for giving up their right to statehood – well, then the Americans probably are finished in the Middle East. We know, of course, who is not finished in that region.

But when, I repeat, you’ve got a US president who believes his country should be paid to intervene militarily in the Middle East, and then paid to leave – hence the threat of Trump sanctions against Iraq (whose president was briefly described in a White House video this week as “the president of Iran”) if it demanded an American military withdrawal – then cash and more cash has replaced that long forgotten moral authority.

After all, Moscow now seems to have more “territorial ambitions” (Surmelian’s language, again) in the Middle East than Washington.

And you should read what Surmelian thought of the Russian Revolution and Bolshevism. But that’s another story.

counterpunch.org

If we remember back to Trump’s presidential campaign, he rather brazenly promised that he would build The Wall and make the Mexicans somehow “pay for it”. Trump later claimed that through renegotiating trade deals (NAFTA) he ultimately fulfilled his promise, although some would debate this. The interesting thing about this moment in Trump history is that he demonstrated a very different, business oriented, way of thinking that wouldn’t have come from other Republicans/Democrats in Washington.

Candidate Trump was also very vocal on NATO spending and the spending of taxpayer money on the US’s many wars of luxury. President Trump hasn’t ended the Military Industrial Complex but he has been forcing NATO members to pay their dues, which are in the realm of tens of billions of dollars.

This is a much more “realist” perception of NATO by Trump. Officially the organization is a group of allies for self-defense but as we know factually it works like means for the US colonization of Europe. The US military does almost all the work, they project their bases onto the Europeans (never the other way around) and with the recent exception of Turkey all NATO members essentially bow down to any demands made by Washington, however in the past this has come at a price. Empire isn’t cheap and we all know who ultimately paid for the Marshall Plan and the rebuilding of Japan after WWII – US taxpayers. The US has financed the farce of NATO, but Trump wants to change this.

Now breaking with over half a century of a particular tradition Trump is allowing 3000 US troops to go to Saudi Arabia on the Saudi’s dime. Now Trump is offering to provide NATO defense to vassals and “make them pay for it”. This profit-driven policy is a radical departure from the status quo and to be honest is a much wiser wiser way of doing things in the long term with one huge exception depending on your view.

If US forces are to be used under the influence of “market demands” that could really put a dent into the seemingly endless national debt. The US has by far the biggest most expensive military in the world and Washington’s vassals at this point have no other choice but to pay the master for protection, making maintaining US military dominance much cheaper. The only disadvantage (depending on your view) is that if Trump pushes for profitability as a key factor in military decisions/policy then we will never be able have another Vietnam.

There is no way the South Vietnamese could have afforded to pay for US security. Their resources would have run out in a matter of weeks or days. If Trump wants the US to act on a “no money no honey” policy then it makes intervention in a Vietnam-like scenario ultimately impossible. This is good for those of us who want a powerful but respectable America, but for the warhawks this is a nightmare. Financial viability as a key concern in military decisions could spell doom for the parties of war, at least while Trump or a like minded individual is in power.

The Russians have also made a major shift in defense policy. The Soviet Union with less money and a distinct lack of the world’s reserve currency played by similar rules during the Cold War – we will throw money, men and resources at any conflict we see fit in order to ultimately win. But today’s Russia is different and when they entered Syria they made it clear to Assad that they are there to “help” and that Assad’s army is going to have to fight its own battles on its own manpower and resources.

If Russia were to enter a long term expensive military conflict it could possibly sink the entire economy or eliminate for generations Moscow’s debt free status. Sending officially invited advisors and selling top-notch equipment – has no negative long term effects. Trump isn’t the only one who sees the value into playing geopolitics on a strict budget.

This decision by Trump to send troops to defend Saudi Arabia at cost or even for profit could have a much grander resonance than it would seem at first. And hopefully, finally, the burden of Empire can be moved from the shoulders of US taxpayers so that they can enjoy the fruits of that which they have financed for decades.

Humanity was treated to an important lecture on peace at a recent event for the NIR School of the Heart by none other than Ellen Degeneres BFF and world-renowned peace expert George W Bush.

“I don’t think the Iranians believe a peaceful Middle East is in their national interest,” said the former president according to The Washington Post’s Josh Rogin, whose brief Twitter thread on the subject appears to be the only record of Bush’s speech anywhere online.

“An isolationist United States is destabilizing around the world,” Bush said during the speech in what according to Rogin was a shot at the sitting president. “We are becoming isolationist and that’s dangerous for the sake of peace.”

For those who don’t speak fluent neoconservative, “isolationist” here means taking even one small step in any direction other than continued military expansionism into every square inch of planet Earth, and “We are becoming isolationist” here means “We have hundreds of military bases circling the globe, our annual military budget is steadily climbing toward the trillion-dollar mark, and we are engaged in countless undeclared wars and regime change interventions all around the world.”

President George W. Bush tonight at the Nir School of the Heart event: “I don’t think the Iranians believe a peaceful Middle East is in their national interest.”

— Josh Rogin (@joshrogin) 16 октября 2019 г.

It is unclear why Bush is choosing to present himself as a more peaceful president than Trump given that by this point in his first term Bush had launched not one but two full-scale ground invasion wars whose effects continue to ravage the Middle East to this very day, especially given the way both presidents appear to be in furious agreement on foreign policy matters like Iran. But here we are.

From a certain point of view it’s hard to say which is stranger: (A) a war criminal with a blood-soaked legacy of mass murder, torture and military expansionism telling Trump that he is endangering peace with his “isolationism”, or (B) the claim that Trump is “isolationist” at all. As we’ve discussed previously, Trump’s so-called isolationism has thus far consisted of killing tens of thousands of Venezuelans with starvation sanctions in an attempt to effect regime change in the most oil-rich nation on earth, advancing a regime change operation in Iran via starvation sanctions, CIA covert ops, and reckless military escalations, continuing to facilitate the Saudi-led slaughter in Yemen and to sell arms to Saudi Arabia, inflating the already insanely bloated US military budget to enable more worldwide military expansionism, greatly increasing the number of bombs dropped per day from the previous administration, killing record numbers of civilians in airstrikes for which he has reduced military accountability, and of course advancing many, many new cold war escalations against the nuclear superpower Russia.

But these bogus warnings about a dangerous, nonexistent threat of isolationism are nothing new for Dubya. In his farewell address to the nation, Bush said the following:

“In the face of threats from abroad, it can be tempting to seek comfort by turning inward. But we must reject isolationism and its companion, protectionism. Retreating behind our borders would only invite danger. In the 21st century, security and prosperity at home depend on the expansion of liberty abroad. If America does not lead the cause of freedom, that cause will not be led.”

As we discussed recently, use of the pro-war buzzword “isolationism” has been re-emerging from its post-Bush hibernation as a popular one-word debunk of any opposition to continued US military expansionism in all directions, and it is deceitful in at least three distinct ways. Firstly, the way it is used consistently conflates isolationism with non-interventionism, which are two wildly different things. Secondly, none of the mainstream political figures who are consistently tarred with the “isolationist” pejorative are isolationists by any stretch of the imagination, or even proper non-interventionists; they all support many interventionist positions which actual non-interventionists object to. Thirdly, calling someone who opposes endless warmongering an “isolationist” makes as much sense as calling someone who opposes rape a man-hating prude; opposing an intrinsically evil act is not the same as withdrawing from the world.

The Forever War Is So Normalized That Opposing It Is “Isolationism”

“Under our current Orwellian doublespeak paradigm where forever war is the new normal, the opposite of war is no longer peace, but isolationism.” #war #peace #TulsiGabbardhttps://t.co/dLbW6O2bRV

— Caitlin Johnstone (@caitoz) 29 июня 2019 г.

Nobody actually believes that US foreign policy is under any threat of anything remotely resembling isolationism. The real purpose of this buzzword is to normalize the forever war and drag the Overton window so far in the direction of ghoulish hawkishness that the opposite of “war” is no longer “peace”, but “isolationism”. By pulling this neat little trick, the propagandists of the political/media class have successfully made endless war seem like a perfectly normal thing to be happening and any small attempt to scale it back look weird and freakish, when the truth is the exact opposite. War is weird, freakish and horrific, and peace is of course normal. This is the only healthy way to see things.

It would actually be great if George W Bush could shut the fuck up forever, ideally in a locked cell following a public war tribunal. Failing that, at the very least people should stop looking at him as a cuddly wuddly teddy bear with whom it’s fun to share a sporting arena suite or a piece of hard candy or to hang award medals on for his treatment of veterans. This mass murdering monster has been growing more and more popular with Democrats lately just because he offers mild criticisms of Trump sometimes, as have war pigs like Bill Kristol and Max Boot and even John Bolton for the same reason, and it needs to stop. And in the name of a million dead Iraqis, please don’t start consulting this man on matters of peace.

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